


Five Companions the Doctor Never Had

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate, Doctor Who, Final Fantasy X-2, Leven Thumps - Obert Skye, Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: 5 Things, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:35:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, five people the Doctor never got to meet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Companions the Doctor Never Had

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to [this](http://notworthy.livejournal.com/324255.html) by notworthy, which is also a multifandom crossover in a 5 things format! :D I copycatted the idea, because Jordy is the best ♥
> 
> Can be read here or [@ LJ.](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/82416.html)
> 
> Since this was originally written in 2009, spoilers only go up through Season 3 of Doctor Who, Book 54 of Animorphs, Book 3 of Leven Thumps, and Pokemon Platinum. None specifically for FFX-2.

-

 

**1\. Dawn**

On the rare occasions that Dawn talks at all, she calls him Dialga, which is actually rather close to "Doctor" and is probably what it evolved from, but it still takes him a few beats before he remembers that she's talking to him when she does it. He can change bodies but he's never changed names, and after awhile he thinks he might even grow to like it, the syllables light in Dawn's accent, her tone respectful but familiar, like he'd always been a friend of hers. In that way, she reminds him a little bit of Reinette. 

He finds these days that people are frequently reminding him of other people.

It has something to do with old age, he's sure.

Dawn is also, probably, the quietest person he has ever met. Quieter even than the people who have made silence their profession, because at least with them you know they would talk if they could and the Doctor so does love goading them. Dawn just never says anything, but she always listens to him when he prattles on -- which he does quite well, thank you very much; he's had a lot of practice and finds it easier than ever with a captive audience -- and he's amazed to see just how much of it she takes in. She remembers some anecdote he tosses out once about a trip he meant to take to Barcelona to see the dogs with no noses, and the next time she has access to a computer, she logs into Bebe's storage system from half a galaxy away and shows him her Manectric, who is, lightning-bolt mane and leaping sparks aside, a dog with no nostrils.

That joke never gets old.

And the Doctor always did have a soft spot for Pokemon, and they're just as much fun to have around the TARDIS as she is. He thinks that might be why Dawn agreed to go with him in the first place. Save the world, close a rift in time and space caused by a hurt, angry creature that _lived,_ impossibly, in the void between dimensions, and take off with a strange man in a blue box? Well, why not?

He's not looking forward to what her mother's going to have to say about that.

With Dawn, there is never a dull moment. She may be quiet and she may be a fantastic cool head to have in a crisis, but she's not meant for staying indoors or staying still, and even when he takes her to one of the moons of Andromeda, where the rain comes down so thick it is difficult to breathe, she just pulls her cap down low over her head and goes tromping out into the mud, ridiculous boots and short skirt and everything. Got to admire a girl who's willing to do that for the sake of seeing the unknown, especially since the mud never does wash out. 

On the other hand, her conscience causes them problems sometimes, like that time they'd snuck into the unveiling of the universe's first successful starbirth, an incredibly VIP event, and she had almost caused a small war over the fact they served Farfetch'd at the banquet, on their backs and golden brown.

After that, they go to the beginning of a world, where Dawn sits outside the TARDIS doors and watches a lungfish crawl out of a shallow pond, gills gaping, flopping bravely in the ooze. She drums her fingers on her knee, universal language for, "why is this taking so long?" and he sits beside her and explains that evolution, for most creatures, is a process that takes millions of years and thousands of generations, just to see the fierce glint of pride that comes to her face when she realizes that Pokemon are the exception, their evolution instantaneous, and just how lucky she is to share a planet with them.

In the end, though, she is just a fourteen-year-old girl, and when he takes her home and she sees her mother drop her strainer at the sight of her, strands of spaghetti noodles flying all across the immaculate kitchen tile, she makes a noise in the back of her throat that is so very young.

He says good-bye, and when he stretches out his hand for a shake, she presses a Pokeball into his palm. He quirks an and eyebrow and she says, "A Carnivine. I think it would be happy in the TARDIS's greenhouse, don't you?"

He smiles and tucks the Pokeball into the pocket of his suit. "I'll see you around."

"Take care, Dialga. Doctor."

On her world, there is a legend about a lonely deity, one of several; one for land, one for sea and one for sky, one for space, one for the darkness, one for summer, and one for time. He doesn't know how the story goes, but he can guess. They all usually end the same; a young woman in a silly outfit, standing alone on her own front porch, watching a blue box fade into nothing.

 

 

**2\. Leven Thumps**

The Doctor has been parking the TARDIS on street corners for so long, it was bound to happen sooner or later; a raised ridge in the sidewalk from where the cement didn't meet up properly, a temperature that was divisible by five in Fahrenheit, and a planet feeling rather good about itself. Nothing like staving off an alien invasion to make you feel chipper. The sun is shining, almost visible through the layer of smog, hazy in the sky from extinguished fires, and the Doctor only a few strides from the TARDIS, smiling to himself, when the toe of his sneaker catches the crack in the pavement.

He pitches forward, almost landing face first into the mud of Sentenniel Marsh. He staggers upright again, looks at the canary-yellow sky and the double suns, and says, brilliantly, _"What?"_

_Step on a crack, and Foo will snatch you back._

Foo, he learns quickly, is more a human world than the Earth it exists behind, like a shadow, the thin fabric of its sky and the quiet whispering of its soil the only thing keeping it from being sucked into the void. Created by human imagination for human imagination and powered by human imagination, he spends his first few days there constantly bombarding his sycophant -- a thin, cat-like creature with huge watery eyes that insists he should have a name other than the Doctor, and how did he feel about Roger? -- with questions.

"I don't really know the answer to that," the sycophant, whose name is something like Dusk, says sheepishly, when the Doctor asks after the borders, which ripple and warp under the sunlight like the surface of water. "You'll have to ask the Want. He's the one whose in charge of worrying about stuff like that."

The Doctor beams at this. "Fantastic! Where is he?"

From the way Dusk talks about him -- through slightly clenched jaws, his ears twisting backward in discomfort like he's been quizzed over something he rather dislikes -- and the fact that the Want lives miles away from anybody on an island that isn't much more than a rock poking out of the water at high tide, the Doctor is expecting some mystical figure, shrouded in mystery -- and possibly a cape; nothing says mystical like a cape, for whatever reason -- and fond of monologues, with an ego bigger than his title necessitates. He's expecting a battle of wits, or at the very least some good drama.

What he gets is a boy, too young for the lanky, grown body he has, dressed in an overlarge purple sweatshirt with a Wonder Wipes logo and ratty sneakers. His hair is too long, streaked white on one side like a skunk, and falling into his eyes, which are lamplit golden and glowing in a rather unsettling way that reminds him a little too keenly of how Rose looked, her face calm and her eyes burning from the Time Vortex.

He stands in the doorway of his cottage when the Doctor arrives, looking like he'd been waiting there for him all along. "There is so much to do, Doctor," he says without preamble, smiling. "And so much I want to show you."

It's strange to have the tables turned on him so suddenly. To be the one who's being shown the world, instead of the one doing the showing. That first day, when the Doctor asks him how he knew who he was, Leven blinks at him and says, "I'm an offing. We see the future."

And the Doctor nods and says, "I'm a Time Lord."

"Exactly. We'll get along just fine."

So Leven takes him to the Devil's Spiral, and they watch the water rush through the coil of the land and out the blowhole with tremendous speed, the water glittering in the morning light. Leven shows him how to manipulate dreams, to catch the swirls of music and light as they lift from the dirt in between his hands and work them so that they become more of what they are, so that the humans dreaming them on Earth wake up with resolve to keep going for the good of others. Putting it like that makes it sound really vague, but it's easy when he's doing it. It's not unlike piloting the TARDIS: you press some buttons, throw in a wrench and some toast, and you talk and croon until she does what you want her to, and you're good to go.

They catch a game of shatterball in the Sentienniel Fields. Leven shows him the mountains of Morfit, with all the citizens trailing up its slopes to lay their burdens down. The Doctor thinks of taking a stone up there for Donna, and maybe another for the Time War, and then realizes there will never be a stone big enough to encompass all his regrets and lets it go. Some of them he's not sure he'd ready to part with. 

After that, they go to Cusp -- where one can be haggling for onions in Chinatown on one street and just one avenue over buy fresh hot chips from a man with an accent from very far North -- and the Doctor meets the last of the lithens, a mellow, laid-back creature named Geth who offers him tea (like any nice, sensible person would) and when the Doctor takes a sip, he carefully puts his cup back down on the saucer and says with what he hopes is great control, "That's a blend from Gallifrey."

"Is it?" says Geth, genuinely interested. "I didn't know we had any flavors from other planets. Mine tastes like the kind my mother used to water me with. Lithen children are grown in gardens, you know," he adds, and the Doctor grins, some of his discomfort melting away. Everything in Foo is fascinating, including the tea that could read your mind and taste like what you most wanted it to taste like. He doesn't recall the tea on Gallifrey had ever been that good, but then again, it had never occurred to him that he might never taste it again when he'd let his planet burn.

"Does he live in Cusp?" he asks Leven later, once he's done showing him how to travel by rope: it's unsettling at first, the sensation of being unwoven, zipped along a cable, and then respooled at his destination like thread. It's also enormously clever, and a very efficient way to travel in a city the size of Cusp.

"Nah," the Want shrugs his skinny shoulders. "He kind of wanders all over. Technically, he has a kingdom and a throne he could return to if he wants, but I think being the last of his kind and all, he wants to see the rest of the world before he settles down anywhere. He likes telling stories about the lithens. His greatest fear is that once he dies, no one in Foo will even remember what a lithen is."

Yeah, the Doctor thinks, and says nothing. He knows how that goes.

When Leven takes him to the gateway in the swamps of Sycophant Run, much to Dusk's horror, the Doctor blinks at him in confusion, "I thought nobody was allowed to go back once they got to Foo. One-way trip and all that."

"It is," says Leven unapologetically. "For humans." He blinks his luminous eyes. "But I know you're nowhere near done, Doctor. You have a great many worlds you have yet to see, and Foo is nothing compared to some of the places you will go."

And, because it's only fair, the Doctor says, "Would you like to come with me?" He thinks Leven will like the moonrise on Prada, with seven moons in different stages of waxing and waning, all the different colors of the rainbow. He thinks it will be nice to take him somewhere where inanimate objects don't complain to him all the time, and where the fate of humanity isn't his concern every hour of every day. Leven showed him Foo; now the Doctor wants to show him the stars.

He catches Leven by surprise. "I never saw you asking me that," he says, voice warm and, for the first time, human. And then, "Yeah. Okay."

(Leven's premonitions come in handy, the Doctor finds; they get a head start on the running for your lives part before things start blowing up. But even the Want has his limits, and when it's time, the Doctor takes him back to Earth, to a quiet neighborhood in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where everyone has the exact same kind of house but different lawn ornaments, and when Leven follows him out of the TARDIS, blinking in confusion, a girl comes dashing out of one of them, her green eyes blazing, and he has time to gasp, "Winter?" before she throws her arms around his neck. Leven meets the Doctor's eyes from around the girl's white-blonde hair and he mouths, "Thank you." And the Doctor smiles, and leaves while the two of them are still babbling over each other on the lawn, for once not feeling sad about it at all. Leven Thumps spends his life trying to grant the greatest wishes of everyone around him, but it had never occurred to him that someone might try and grant his.)

 

 

**3\. Paine**

If you'd told him (not so long ago) that he would take up traveling with an ex-revolutionary who carried a sword nearly as long as she was, he would have laughed in your face. Or something appropriately equivalent.

The Garment Grids are fantastically clever, though. He wouldn't mind one of those for the TARDIS wardrobe room, although the mess in there is half its charm and he probably wouldn't change it even if he could. (He almost asks her where she got it anyway, because it would be a nice thing to have. Not necessarily to use, but just to have. He doesn't have any other artifacts from Spira -- besides a plush moogle that he thinks he stuffed with baking soda and put in the fridge when something started to smell, and he feels a little guilty about that because the moogle was a gift and not many people give him gifts these days, unless they're attached to something explosive.)

Paine left before anyone on her ship had even woken up yet; merely left a note for Brother on the bridge in her minimalist way, and if the Doctor had the kind of mother who did such things, she would have warned him about girls who would leave everything behind because he asked them to, to step into his time machine and never look back, because they tend to be trouble.

Paine is a journalist. And an archaeologist (of sorts.) And a pirate. And a lot of other things. She gets them into trouble a lot.

And then, usually, she gets them right back out again. The sword helps.

It's rather hard to explain at parties, though, but the Doctor is nothing if not excellent at improvising and Paine is nothing if not excellent at remaining taciturn and looking perfectly entitled to be decked out in black leather and carrying around a giant sword, so it works out.

They drop in on the controversial 143th Blitzball Championship on a planet that probably didn't even know the sport had come from Spira, and her eyes dance in amusement at the exaggerated costumes and the shouts of the crowd. He shows her the headdresses they have on Parovillia at the height of the Fourth Great Empire's economic prosperity, and she concedes that the fashion in Luca is almost sensible by comparison. Together they topple the regime of a tyrannical fascist with a few well-placed suggestions in the ears of a few well-positioned non-tyrannical grandchildren, and if Paine does spend a sizable amount of time with a young woman who usually works with the AC and will eventually lead the most powerful separatist faction that arises post-coup, well, the Doctor can hardly complain. She has good taste.

They're supposed to be watching the recital of an Aquadian Aquarius Mermaid ballet troupe -- whose suspended spheres of water and dance routines involving synchronized movements of iridescent fins are coveted universally -- and arrive ten years too late, during an Aquadian civil war, which isn't nearly so synchronized and a lot more wet, and the Doctor does something heroic and Paine holds a little mermaid girl as she dies, and when he finds her again, she pulls the hood of her White Mage outfit up so he can't see her face, her lips and fingertips trembling with fatigue, and he doesn't comment on how the air smells like too much Curaga. The mermaid is still and silent.

(He sees Full Throttle only once, Paine a flaring, dancing spectacle of steel feathers, too big and too dangerous for the woman suddenly so small inside of it, but the less said about that occasion, the better.)

It's good to have Paine around. Really. He takes her to Women Wept, and if she can tell that he isn't really standing there with her -- and he's sure she can -- she doesn't comment. She doesn't ask. She doesn't make promises and she doesn't make him make promises. She just stands beside him on foreign planets, her heels impossible and her eyes fierce with the delight of exploration, and it's enough. The Doctor has loved them all, in his way, and sometimes, sometimes, he is glad just to travel with someone who scorns the word "forever."

"You know where we should go?" he chirps, from somewhere underneath the grating in the control room, tinkering with veins and wires -- hard to tell the difference sometime, fantastic ship like the TARDIS. "Brilliant place. Called Earth. Full of funny little people that you probably evolved from, and they're all obsessed with each other's sex lives and chips, and poking their noses into places where they shouldn't belong. Oh, a sleeping Oggrasaur from somewhere where humans are served up as snacks, underneath all my plumbing? Let's poke it in the eye and see what happens!"

"Sounds like every man I've ever met," says Paine wryly.

"Oi!" he goes, popping over the other side of the console to stare at her appropriately, so he doesn't miss it: that might have been a smile.

His grin suddenly feels too large for his face. He jerks a lever. "Where to?" he asks.

 

 

 

**4\. the Master**

It's easy, if a little awkward, like trying to fit into a shirt that's now two sizes too small for you, because you never truly forget how. He was this boy's friend once, and. And.

You never truly forget.

_So those are my options? Die, or live entirely at your mercy?_

_No, not like that. You'll come with me. You and me and the TARDIS. The last two Time Lords and the last timeship in existence._

_Until what? You can deliver me over to the Shadow Proclamation, all nice and tidy with a big silver bow? Happy bleeding Christmas, and all that?_

_....._

_... Unless. Unless you're NOT going to hand me over to the Shadow Proclamation._

_....._

_Oh. Oh ho ho ho. Now THAT is precious. The lonely god, the destroyer of worlds, the sodding DOCTOR wants to keep me for himself. Like a pet. Like a toy. Like a specimen in a museum._

_Do you WANT me to turn you in? You'll just die then. Probably more painfully. Well, maybe. I don't know. I haven't been keeping up with the latest interrogation methods; maybe they've done on a mercy kick._

_My other option being permanent house arrest. With you._

_Really, as far as prisons go..._

_And if I die? If I refuse to regenerate, right here, right now, in front of all your tiny little apes? What will you do then, Doctor?_

_Don't._

_Hmm? Would you bargain for my life? Give them their Earth, but refuse them justice? Can you do that?_

_Don't. Don't. Just..._

_I wonder, Doctor. Would they trust you after that? Would any of them ever willingly go with you again, knowing that you'd prefer me over them? That their company is nothing to mine. That you'd forgive me anything, just so you wouldn't be alone._

_I don't._

_You do. You always have. No. I like this ending, Doctor, because this way, I die. You survive._

_Don't do this. Please. Come with me. Please._

_No. I won't. Because this way? This way, Doctor, your punishment is far greater than mine. I can't think of a more fitting ending for you. Alive._

You never truly forget. And in his arms, the Master bites back the instinct to regenerate, bites and bites and bites because his hatred is more powerful than his need to live, his pride meaning more to him than the Doctor ever will.

It doesn't matter. The Master comes with him, anyway, in a way. His own personal ghost, drumming his fingertips together in an eternal (heart)beat, his lips brushing in imaginary words, "And you were so close, so close to getting ... what?"

This regeneration around, the Doctor has found he has a hard time letting things (people) go.

 

 

 

**5\. Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul**

{This isn't the Time Matrix?} is the first thing the Andalite asks, uncomfortably shifting his weight on the narrow, uneven ramps around the TARDIS control room, because the ship had been made for aliens with two feet, not four. His stalk eyes are twisted in opposite directions, and the Doctor wonders if he'll ever get a pair of those. They'd be handy. He could live without the tail, though. And he doesn't think Andalites come in ginger.

"What, no remarks on how it's bigger on the inside?" he mutters under his breath, and can't believe he's even complaining about it. The things you come to expect. "And no," he answers, offended, putting his hand on the console as if to reassure his ship that the stupid four-legged alien really didn't mean it like that. "Your Time Matrix is to the TARDIS as tiki torches are to strip wall lighting."

The corners of Elfangor's eyes crinkle up in the Andalite version of a smile. {Of course it is,} he says, placating.

It is just the beginning of a lot of things, and Elfangor isn't a war hero, not yet, and more importantly, he's not dead for a stupid reason, and he helped the Doctor save some small, backworld planet that in a million years will be the hub of intergalactic trade, but only if the Yeerks didn't get their hands on the natives first, natives who hadn't let looked up at the stars with fear, wondering which of the lights hovering up there was hostile. One Time Lord can save a planet, but two can save a planet, scare off an invading race, and still be home in time for tea. He hadn't been sure what he'd been expecting when he allowed the pilot to acquire his DNA; which of his faces would appear out of that changing flesh, who he would sound most like. He winds up with a copy of himself -- of course -- who whips his whole body for lack of stalk eyes around and seems rather fond of wagging his tongue places where they shouldn't be, and once the world's safe, the Doctor promises him a ride home (he'd accidentally cost Elfangor his ship. Not his fault, he swears.)

The second thing the Andalite asks, inside his timeship, is, {You don't happen to know the Ellimist, do you?} And the Doctor snorts and mutters something about inferior races and how he hates having the Ellimists blundering around the time-space continuum like monkeys with wrenches. Elfangor laughs and tells him they'll get along just fine.

The third thing he asks is, {You say it can go anywhere?}

"Near abouts!" the Doctor replies cheerfully, leaning back against a railing and beaming. "And I say we have time for a side trip. Where would you like to go, Officer Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul? Just name it! Wherever it is, I'm sure we can find a morph for you to use to fit in," he eyes him contemplatively as Elfangor tries to maneuver himself into something approaching comfortable in the cluttered control room. Elfangor exhales sharply through the vertical slits where a nose would be on a human; a habit he'd picked up from them, actually.

{I have a son,} he starts, and the Doctor immediately turns soft with knowing. {He doesn't know ... I would like to ... if it's possible .... can I see him? Just the once?}

The Doctor has a dozen excuses ready-made for occasions like this -- Reapers and humans unable to keep their hands to themselves and it's a bad idea, really, but he thinks Elfangor might understand the importance of keeping secrets, and he turns to set the coordinates for Earth.

They arrive in mid-June, at the peak of a heat wave; the air vibrates from want of water, the sun bright and hot and the earth brown and dusty and clinging to their shoes. Elfangor is just a few steps behind him, awkward in a human form he hasn't worn for years. Up ahead, oblivious to their unauthorized arrival, is a wedding. The Doctor's always liked weddings; it's universal across the galaxies, culture and life at its best. A time when everyone (hypothetically) puts aside their antagonism and gets along for the sake of bride and groom, making toasts to hope. Hope's always a good thing to have. Love is even better.

Toby Hamee he points out, because she makes a beautiful bride, in a fearsome, headstrong, you'll-never-need-a-can-opener-ever-again kind of way, the blades all along her body glinting in the sun. Her groom he doesn't bother; Elfangor doesn't need to hear Jake Berenson's story, a war hero too sunken in on himself after the death of his cousin to ever face his friends again, a human child with the ability to morph, who sought permanent refuge in Hork-Bajir form. "That's Jake," is all he says, as Toby's mother does something complicated over the couple's head with twin branches of a sapling. "They represent the Hork-Bajir colony on Earth. First Contact was, officially, several years ago in London, but this is the first openly declared settlement of an alien race on Earth soil."

"I remember the so-called First Contact," Elfangor's eyes are riveted on the ceremony, like he can't reconcile free Hork-Bajir living on a planet that had once been his hide-away. "Loren always thought Harriet Jones was fishy."

"She was a very nice lady," the Doctor feels the need to defend her, since she's dead and all. "She just had a habit of getting carried away."

Toby's mother steps away, and now a young man comes forward to perform some ritual or another, his suit too tight around his shoulders and his tawny hair flyaway in the wind, and the Doctor leans his shoulder into Elfangor's and says, softly, "That's him. Your son."

The prince-to-be swallows, hard, his eyes going wide and focused as if that would help him take in more details. He wonders, briefly, if it was fair to choose a moment in time when Tobias was pretending, wearing a tuxedo instead of feathers, a smile instead of a hooked beak, if it's right to try and spare a father that: the knowledge that his son's life has been full of more tragedy than most.

"He looks so much like Loren," Elfangor murmurs. His sharp gaze flicks to the Doctor, comprehension coming to him in bursts and flashes. "So this is..."

"Several years after human victory over the Yeerks," he clarifies, hearing Elfangor inhale shakily. "It's a long war, fought mostly by sabotage. Your son helped." Understatement. "Well, when I say he helped, I meant he was one of maybe six individuals who managed to topple the Visser's regime pretty much single-handedly." Tobias is delivering a speech now; they're standing too far away to catch more than bits and pieces of it. He says something, tone dry, and the audience laughs obediently. Jake rolls his eyes, which is an odd thing to see a Hork-Bajir do.

"Six individuals?"

"Five humans and one Andalite _arsith."_ Bollocks if he was going to tell him _which_ Andalite. "Defenders of the Earth!"

Elfangor stares at him. "The Yeerk empire is defeated by five humans and a child?"

Hmm. Maybe he's revealed a little bit too much. He always did like to talk. That was his problem. "Well, you guys helped. A little bit. It takes awhile. But the Andalites are also responsible for unleashing the Yeerks on the universe in the first place. There's no escaping that label in history, I'm afraid. Not one of your more brilliant ideas, as a race."

Elfangor is silent for a long time, long enough for Tobias to finish what he's saying and wish the couple all the happiness in the world, and if there's any bitterness in it, any lingering ill-will for what happened to Rachel, that this is Jake's wedding and not his, well, nobody does a poker face quite like Tobias, so that's okay. "I really don't see," says Elfangor, after the silence has stretched between them. "How what the Andalites did for the Yeerks is any different than what you're doing right now."

The Doctor blinks. "I beg your pardon?"

"You. Taking members of inferior species around in your time machine, showing them the birth of the galaxies and their own great-great-grandparents, just to see the wonder on their faces. It doesn't take much to realize that's what you do, Doctor. I am obviously not the first. How is it so different than what we wanted for the Yeerks? We wanted to expand their world. Show them something that is fantastical to them and commonplace to us, just so we could fall in love again."

"I do that with one or two humans." More like fifteen, twenty, but who's counting? Some of them made bigger impressions than others. "I didn't toss their entire species into the space-time continuum and said, swim."

"Didn't you? Tell me, Doctor, have any of your enlightened humans gone on to do something terrible in your name? Reacted to what you made them in the only way they knew how?"

Kneejerk, the Doctor thinks of Rose, carrying a gun, Mickey and Jackie following her lead, Jack with Sarah Jane's warp star curled in his fingers, Martha with her nuclear weapons. Soldiers, all of them, because of him.

He turns away, and Elfangor has his answer.

Later, after Tobias's two hours are up and Elfangor gets to see his son morph (without mentioning, of course, that he was _de_ morphing,) they stand somewhere very high up in Yellowstone; the Hork-Bajir colony spreads far below them in one direction, and the city in the other. Somewhere in the distance, fog covers the bay.

"We do strange things for love of them, don't we?" Elfangor murmurs, sounding something like the prince he will be, the legend he will come, an alien who gave humans -- silly, amazing little apes -- technology they should never have had, on a whim, on a hope, just to see the look in their eyes before he died. "I wasn't born here and they aren't my people, but Doctor, this planet is more home to me than anywhere else."

And yeah, the Doctor thinks. It goes something like that.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
